Synge and the Ireland of his Time: XV

I wrote the most of these thoughts in my diary on the coast of Normandy,
and as I finished came upon Mont Saint Michel, and thereupon doubted for
a day the foundation of my school. Here I saw the places of assembly,
those cloisters on the rock's summit, the church, the great halls where
monks, or knights, or men at arms sat at meals, beautiful from ornament
or proportion. I remembered ordinances of the Popes forbidding drinking-
cups with stems of gold to these monks who had but a bare dormitory to
sleep in. Even when imagining, the individual had taken more from his
fellows and his fathers than he gave; one man finishing what another had
begun; and all that majestic fantasy, seeming more of Egypt than of
Christendom, spoke nothing to the solitary soul, but seemed to announce
whether past or yet to come an heroic temper of social men, a bondage of
adventure and of wisdom. Then I thought more patiently and I saw that
what had made these but as one and given them for a thousand years the
miracles of their shrine and temporal rule by land and sea, was not a
condescension to knave or dolt, an impoverishment of the common thought
to make it serviceable and easy, but a dead language and a communion in
whatever, even to the greatest saint, is of incredible difficulty. Only
by the substantiation of the soul I thought, whether in literature or in
sanctity, can we come upon those agreements, those separations from all
else that fasten men together lastingly; for while a popular and
picturesque Burns and Scott can but create a province, and our Irish
cries and grammars serve some passing need, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante,
Goethe and all who travel in their road with however poor a stride,
define races and create everlasting loyalties. Synge, like all of the
great kin, sought for the race, not through the eyes or in history, or
even in the future, but where those monks found God, in the depths of the
mind, and in all art like his, although it does not command - indeed
because it does not - may lie the roots of far-branching events. Only
that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not
persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain is
irresistible. It is made by men who expressed themselves to the full, and
it works through the best minds; whereas the external and picturesque and
declamatory writers, that they may create kilts and bagpipes and
newspapers and guide-books, leave the best minds empty, and in Ireland
and Scotland England runs into the hole. It has no array of arguments and
maxims, because the great and the simple (and the Muses have never known
which of the two most pleases them) need their deliberate thought for the
day's work, and yet will do it worse if they have not grown into or found
about them, most perhaps in the minds of women, the nobleness of emotion,
associated with the scenery and events of their country, by those great
poets, who have dreamed it in solitude, and who to this day in Europe are
creating indestructible spiritual races, like those religion has created
in the East.